At the end of May 2010, New York lost a restaurant called Gino of Capri, a bubble of tradition that had operated on Lexington Avenue since 1945. One long room with fluorescent lighting and red wallpaper dotted with zebras, Gino’s served red-sauce Italian food to legions of loyal regulars that included, throughout the years, Frank Sinatra, I.M. Pei, and Gay Talese. In The Missing Ingredient, a documentary out from Virgil Films on October 11, writer and director Michael Sparaga brings Gino’s back to life and enlists several of its most prominent patrons to help explain what, exactly, makes a restaurant an institution.

The foil to Gino’s in The Missing Ingredient is a restaurant on Second Avenue called Pescatore and its soft-spoken owner, Charles Devigne. Struggling to keep Pescatore afloat in a changing neighborhood, Devigne realizes it is not enough to simply serve good food and provide excellent service. A restaurant needs an elusive je ne sais quoi to rise above the din of competition. In an act of hubris, he appropriates the departed Ginos’s wallpaper for his own restaurant, a decision—with consequences—that illustrates the complexity of the film’s central question.

With its uproarious cast of characters, The Missing Ingredient paints a poignant, funny, sad, and engaging portrait of New York City restaurant life. Ahead of its release on DVD and a variety of digital platforms, including iTunes and Amazon, Michael Sparaga chatted with V.F. about the film and about the magic of New York restaurants.

Vanity Fair: You have a background in restaurants. The film came about because you met Charles Devigne while working at Pescatore, and kept in touch with him, which is how you heard about his Gino’s wallpaper idea.

Michael Sparaga: I always had a vision of becoming a filmmaker. For me, waiting tables became more than just what would give me that opportunity—it also became the fodder for two of the five films I’ve done. Food is very important to my family, but the restaurant business became very important to me because I’m particularly fascinated by the sense of family that exists in restaurants. And it’s family not just between owners and staff, but also between regulars themselves.

Your most recent previous film was a feature comedy (Servitude, 2011). How did this project start?

This movie was made just by credit cards and line of credit over two-and-a half-years, taking my time, finding the story, getting introduced. It wasn’t something that the world was clamoring for. It was this little moment in time, and I really had only about a week to make a decision about whether there was a film. I heard the story about the wallpaper and just decided I couldn’t let it go by.

How do you feel about the current cultural obsession with food? It seems like everyone with an Internet connection feels they’re a food expert.

I think it’s not just food. People feel that their comment in the comment section of a well-researched article in The New York Times is just as relevant as the article—that they’re just as published. And I think it’s a thing with food and Yelp, for instance. This is a gentle film, but there’s a subversiveness to it as well. I know everybody says at a certain point that things were better before; I generally think things were better before.

That’s an idea that would resonate with the Gino’s crowd. It’s an older crowd, an artistic crowd. What is it about a restaurant like Gino’s that brings in that crowd? Is it just tradition?

I think several things bring people in to start: word-of-mouth in the neighborhood, sometimes just being local. Who goes there is a big thing, and Gino’s—anybody we would ever meet who went to Gino’s would have been aware, since it’s been open since 1945. You would have a sense that that was Hemingway’s table. And there’s something great about going to a place that certain people like Sinatra and Hemingway have gone to. People always ask: “What’s the missing ingredient?” Well, it doesn’t hurt to have Sinatra come to your restaurant.

Despite famous clientele, the restaurant was so clearly a community and a ritual.

It used to be that you finished work at six and you were down at the bar, and you drank and socialized until you went home. This was your social life. I would kill to be able to go back in time for a week so people would start to know me by the end of that week, and I would just sit there and talk. Even when I go out to a film festival, I love hitting the same place two or three times in a row because you start to feel like you know what the place feels like. You can ask why people choose a restaurant: they like how it makes them feel. The food is important-ish, but really they like how it makes them feel.

Even though Gino’s comes across as the focal point of the film, in many ways it’s more about Charles Devigne.

I knew who Charles was as a restaurateur, and that’s what I like about Charles. He is a person that likes to go to the side of someone’s table and be part of their evening out. Charles is an old-soul restaurateur. He makes eye contact with everybody that comes through the door. The connection really is that Charles embodies what Gino’s was about. He realized he owned one of those other restaurants of New York, not an institution, but a long-term place that’s a local eatery—and he wanted to be a little more than that.